“What would you like me to say?”
“Nothing. It’s too late. I told you a wise guy never fools anybody but himself. I told you straight and clear. So it didn’t take. Right now it might be smart for you to leave town. Nobody likes you and a couple of guys that don’t like people do something about it. I had the word from a stoolie.”
“I’m not that important, Bernie. Let’s stop snarling at each other. Until Wade was dead you didn’t even enter the case. After that it didn’t seem to, matter to you and to the coroner or to the D.A. or to anybody. Maybe I did some things wrong. But the truth came out. You could have had her yesterday afternoon—with what?”
“With what you had to tell us about her.”
“Me? With the police work I did behind your back?”
He stood up abruptly. His face was red. “Okay, wise guy. She’d have been alive. We could have booked her on suspicion. You wanted her dead; you punk, and you know it.”
“I wanted her to take a good long quiet look at herself. What she did about it was her business. I wanted to dear an innocent man. I didn’t give a good goddam how I did it and I don’t now. I’ll be around when you feel like doing something about me.”
“The hard boys will take care of you, buster. I won’t have to bother. You think you’re not important enough to bother them. As a P.I. named Marlowe, check. You’re not. As a guy who was told where to get off and blew a raspberry in their faces publicly in a newspaper, that’s different. That hurts their pride.”
“That’s pitiful,” I said, “Just thinking about it makes me bleed internally, to use your own expression.”
He went across to the door and opened it. He stood looking down the redwood steps and at the trees on the hill across the way and up the slope at the end of the street.
“Nice and quiet here,” he said. “Just quiet enough.”
He went on down the steps and got into his car and left, Cops never say goodbye. They’re always hoping to see you again in the line-up.
47
For a short time the next day things looked like getting lively. District Attorney Springer called an early press conference and delivered a statement. He was the big florid black-browed prematurely gray-haired type that always does so well in politics.
“I have read the document which purports to be a confession by the unfortunate and unhappy woman who recently took her life, a document which may or may not be genuine, but which, if genuine, is obviously the product of a disordered mind. I am willing to assume that the journal published this document in good faith, in spite of its many absurdities and inconsistencies, and these I shall not bore you with enumerating. If Eileen Wade wrote these words, and my office in conjunction with the staff of my respected coadjutor, Sheriff Petersen, will soon determine whether or no she did, then I say to you that she did not write them with a clear head, nor with a steady hand. It is only a matter of weeks since the unfortunate lady found her husband wallowing in his own blood, spilled by his own hand. Imagine the shock, the despair, the utter loneliness which must have followed so sharp a disaster! And now she has joined him in the bitterness of death. Is anything to be gained by disturbing the ashes of the dead? Anything, my friends, beyond the sale of a few copies of a newspaper which is badly in need of circulation? Nothing, my friends, nothing. Let us leave it at that. Like Ophelia in that great dramatic masterpiece called Hamlet, by the immortal William Shakespeare, Eileen Wade wore her rue with a difference. My political enemies would like to make much of that difference, but my friends and-fellow voters will not be deceived. They know that this office has long stood for wise and mature law enforcement, for justice tempered with mercy, for solid, stable, and conservative government. The Journal stands for I know not what, and for what it stands I do not much or greatly care. Let the enlightened public judge for itself.”
The Journal printed this guff in its early edition (it was a round-the-clock newspaper) and Henry Sherman, the Managing Editor, came right back at Springer with a signed comment.
Mr. District-Attorney Springer was in good form this morning. He is a fine figure of a man and he speaks with a rich baritone voice that is a pleasure to listen to. Be did not bore us with any facts. Any time Mr. Springer cares to have the authenticity of the document in question proved to him, the Journal will be most happy to oblige. We do not expect Mr. Springer to take any action to reopen cases which had been officially dosed with his sanction or under his direction, just as we do not expect Mr. Springer to stand on his head on the tower of the City Hall. As Mr. Springer so aptly phrases it, is anything to be gained by disturbing the ashes of the dead? Or, as the Journal would prefer to phrase it less elegantly, is anything to be gained by finding out who committed a murder when the murderee is already dead? Nothing, of course, but justice and truth.
On behalf of the late William Shakespeare, the Journal wishes to thank Mr. Springer for his favorable mention of Hamlet, and for his substantially, although not exactly, correct allusion to Ophelia. ‘You must wear your rue with a difference’ was not said of Ophelia but by her, and just what she meant has never been very dear to our less erudite minds. But let that pass. It sounds well and helps to confuse the issue. Perhaps we may be permitted to quote, also from that officially approved dramatic production known as Hamlet, a good thing that happened to be said by a bad man: “And where the offence is let the great axe fall.”
Lonnie Morgan called me up about noon and asked me how I liked it. I told him I didn’t think it would do Springer any harm.
“Only with the eggheads,” Lonnie Morgan said, “and they already had his number. I meant what about you?”
“Nothing about me. I’m just sitting here waiting for a soft buck to rub itself against my cheek.”
“That wasn’t exactly what I meant.”
“I’m still healthy. Quit trying to scare me. I got what I wanted. If Lennox was still alive he could walk right up to Springer and spit in his eye.”
“You did it for him. And by this time Springer knows that. They got a hundred ways to frame a guy they don’t like. I don’t figure what made it worth your time. Lennox wasn’t that much man.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
He was silent for a moment. Then he said: “Sorry, Marlowe. Shut my big mouth. Good lucL”
We hung up after the usual goodbyes.
About two in the afternoon Linda Loring called me. “No names, please,” she said. “I’ve just flown in from that big lake up north. Somebody up there is boiling over something that was in the Journal last night. My almost ex-husband got it right between the eyes. The poor man was weeping when I left. He flew up to report.”
“What do you mean, almost ex-husband?”
“Don’t be stupid. For once Father approves. Paris is an excellent place to -get a quiet divorce. So I shall soon be leaving to go there. And if you have any sense left you could do worse than spend a little of that fancy engraving you showed me going a long way off yourself.”
“What’s it got to do with me?”
“That’s the second stupid question you’ve asked. You’re not fooling anyone but yourself, Marlowe. Do you know how they shoot tigers?”
“How would I?”
“They tie a goat to a stake and then hide out in a blind. It’s apt to be rough on the goat. I like you. I’m sure I don’t know why, but I do. I hate the idea of your being the goat. You tried so hard to do the right thing—as you saw it.”
“Nice of you,” I said. “If I stick my neck out and it gets chopped, it’s still my neck.”
“Don’t be a hero, you fool,” she said sharply. “Just because someone we knew chose to be a fall guy, you don’t have to imitate him.”
“I’ll buy you a drink if you’re ging to be around long enough.”
“Buy me one in Paris. Paris is lovely in the fall.”
“I’d like to do that too. I hear it was even better in the spring. Never having been there I wouldn’t know.”
“The way you’re going you never will.”
“Goodbye, Linda. I hope you find what you want.”
“Goodbye,” she said coldly. “I always find what I want. But when I find it, I don’t want it any more.”
She hung up. The rest of the day was a blank. I ate dinner and left the Olds at an all night garage to have the brake linings checked. I took a cab home. The street was as empty as usual. In the wooden mailbox was a free soap coupon. I went up the steps slowly. It was a soft night with a little haze-in the air. The trees on the hill hardly moved. No breeze. I unlocked the door and pushed it part way open and then stopped. The door was about ten inches open from the frame. It was dark inside, there was no sound. But I had the feeling that the room beyond was not empty. Perhaps a spring squeaked faintly or I caught the gleam of a white jacket across the room. Perhaps on a warm still night like this one the room beyond the door was not warm enough, not still enough. Perhaps there was a drifting smell of man on the air. And perhaps I was just on edge.
I stepped sideways off the porch on to the ground and leaned down against the shrubbery. Nothing happened. No light went on inside, there was no movement anywhere that I heard, I had a gun in a belt holster on the left side, butt forward, a short-barreled Police 38. I jerked it out and it got me nowhere. The silence continued. I decided I was a damn fool. I straightened up and lifted a foot to go back to the front door, and then a car turned the corner and came fast up the -hill and stopped almost without sound at the foot of my steps. It was a big-black sedan with the lines of a Cadillac, It could have been Linda Loring’s car, except for two things. Nobody opened a door and the windows on my side were all shut tight. I waited and listened, crouched against the bush, and there was nothing to listen to and nothing to wait for. Just a dark car motionless at the foot of my redwood steps, with the windows closed. If its motor -was still running I couldn’t hear it. Then a big red spotlight clicked on and the beam struck twenty feet beyond the corner of the house. And then very slowly the big car backed until the spotlight could swing across the front of the house, across the hood and up.
Policemen don’t drive Cadillacs. Cadillacs with red spotlights belong to the big boys, mayors and police commissioners, perhaps District Attorneys. Perhaps hoodlums. The spotlight traversed. I went down flat, but it found me just the same. It held on me. Nothing else. Still the car door didn’t open, still the house was silent and without light.
Then a siren growled in low pitch just for a second or two and stopped. And then at last the house was full of lights and a man in a white dinner jacket came out to the head of the steps and looked sideways along the wall and the shrubbery.
“Come on in, cheapie,” Menendez said with a chuckle, “You’ve got company.”
I could have shot him with no trouble at all. Then he stepped back and it was too late—even if I could have done it. Then a window went down at the back of the car and I could hear the thud as it opened. Then a machine pistol went off and fired a short burst into the slope of the bank thirty feet away from me. � “Come on in, cheapie,” Menendez said again from the doorway. “There just ain’t anywhere else to go.”
So I straightened up and went and the spotlight followed me accurately. I put the gun back in the hoslter on my belt. I stepped up onto the small redwood landing and went in through the door and stopped just inside. A man was sitting across the room with his legs crossed and a gun resting sideways on his thigh. He looked rangy and tough and his skin had that dried-out look of people who live in sun-bleached cilmates. He was wearing a dark brown gabardine-type windbreaker and the zipper was open almost to his waist. He was looking at me and neither his eyes nor the gun moved. He was as calm as an adobe wall in the moonlight.
48
I looked at him too long. There was a brief half-seen move at my side and a numbing pain in the point of my shoulder. My whole arm went dead to the fingertips. I turned and looked at a big mean-looking Mexican. He wasn’t grinning, he was just watching me. The .45 in his brown hand dropped to his side. He had a mustache and his head bulged with oily black hair brushed up and back and over and down. There was a dirty sombrero on the back of his head and the leather chin strap hung loose in two strands down the front of a stitched shirt that smelled of sweat. There is nothing -tougher than a tough Mexican, just as there is nothing gentler than a gentle Mexican, nothing more honest than an honest Mexican, and above all nothing sadder than a sad Mexican. This guy was one of the hard boys. They don’t come any harder anywhere.
I rubbed my arm. It tingled a little but the ache was still there and the numbness. If I had tried to pull a gun I should probably have dropped it.
Menendez held his hand out towards the slugger. Without seeming to look he tossed the gun and Menendez caught it. He stood in front of me now and his face glistened. “Where would you like it, cheapie?” His black eyes danced.
I just looked at him. There is no answer to a question like that.
“I asked you a question, cheapie.”
I wet my lips and asked one back. “What happened to Agostino? I thought he was your gun handler.”
“Chick went soft,” he said gently.
“He was always soft—like his boss.”
The man in the chair flicked his eyes. He almost but not quite smiled. The tough boy who had paralyzed my arm neither moved nor spoke. I knew he was breathing. I could smell that.
“Somebody bump into your arm, cheapie?”
“I tripped over an enchilada.”
Negligently, not quite looking at me even, he slashed me across the face with the gun barrel.
“Don’t get gay with me, cheapie. You’re out of time for all that. You got told and you got told nice. When I take the trouble to call around personally and tell a character to lay off—he lays off, Or else he lays down and don’t get up.”
I could feel a trickle of blood down my cheek. I could feel the full numbing ache of the blow in my cheekbone. It spread until my whole head ached. It hadn’t been a hard blow, but the thing he used was hard. I could still talk, and nobody tried to stop me.
“How come you do your own slugging, Mendy? I thought that was coolie labor for the sort of boys that beat up Big Willie Magoon.”
“It’s the personal touch,” he said softly, “on account of I had personal reasons for telling you. The Magoon job was strictly business. He got to thinking he could push me around—me that bought his clothes and his cars and stocked his safe deposit box and paid off the trust deed on his house, These vice squad babies are all the same. I even paid school bills for his kid. You’d think the bastard would have some gratitude. So what does he do? He walks into my private office and slaps me around in front of the help.”
“On account of why?” I asked him, in the vague hope of getting him mad at somebody else.
“On account of some lacquered chippie said we used loaded dice. Seems like the bim was one of his sleepy-time gals. I had her put out of the dub—with every dime she brought in with her.”
“Seems understandable,” I said. “Magoon ought to know no professional gambler plays crooked games. He doesn’t have to. But what have I done to you?”
He hit me again, thoughtfully. “You made me look bad. In my racket you don’t tell a guy twice. Not even a hard number. He goes out and does it, or you �ain’t got controL You ain’t got control, you ain’t in business.”
“I’ve got a hunch that there’s a little more to it than that,” I said. “Excuse me if I reach for a handkerchief.”
The gun watched me while I got one out and touched the blood on my face.
“A two-bit peeper,” Menendez said slowly, “figures he can make a monkey out of Mendy Menendez. He can get me laughed at. He can get me the big razzoo—me, Menendez. I ought to use a knife on you, cheapie. I ought to cut you into slices of raw meat.”
“Lennox was your pal,” I said, and watched his eyes, “He got dead. He got buried like a dog without even a name over the dirt where they put his body. And I had a little something to do with proving him innocent. So that makes you look bad, huh? He saved your life and he lost his, and that didn’t mean a thing to you. All that means anything to you is playing the big shot. You didn’t give a hoot in hell for anybody but yourself. You’re not big, you’re just loud.”
His face froze and he swung his arm back to slug me a third time and this time with the power behind it. His arm was still going back when I took a half step forward and kicked him in the pit of the stomach.
I didn’t think, I didn’t plan, I didn’t figure my chances or whether I had any. I just got enough of his yap and I ached and bled and maybe I was just a little punch drunk by this time.
He jackknifed, gasping, and the gun fell out of his hand. He groped for it wildly making strained sounds deep in his throat. I put a knee into his face. He screeched.